The Reign of Recycling

[EC]

IF you live in the United States, you probably do some form of recycling. It’s likely that you separate paper from plastic and glass and metal. You rinse the bottles and cans, and you might put food scraps in a container destined for a composting facility. As you sort everything into the right bins, you probably assume that recycling is helping your community and protecting the environment. But is it? Are you in fact wasting your time?

In 1996, I wrote a long article for The New York Times Magazine arguing that the recycling process as we carried it out was wasteful. I presented plenty of evidence that recycling was costly and ineffectual, but its defenders said that it was unfair to rush to judgment. Noting that the modern recycling movement had really just begun just a few years earlier, they predicted it would flourish as the industry matured and the public learned how to recycle properly.

So, what’s happened since then? While it’s true that the recycling message has reached more people than ever, when it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all.

Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”

While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time.

The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”
Photo
Credit Santtu Mustonen

Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.

They probably don’t know, for instance, that to reduce carbon emissions, you’ll accomplish a lot more by sorting paper and aluminum cans than by worrying about yogurt containers and half-eaten slices of pizza. Most people also assume that recycling plastic bottles must be doing lots for the planet. They’ve been encouraged by the Environmental Protection Agency, which assures the public that recycling plastic results in less carbon being released into the atmosphere.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-of-recycling.html?_r=2

Yes, it's the Slimes. Still a damned good article.

[alicewonders]

Recycling is voluntary in my community.  They have the dumpsters in the Community College parking lot and you can put your sorted stuff there if you like.  Not very many people do it.  The only thing we save is metal to take to the scrap yard.  When we get enough, we take a load and usually get hundreds of dollars in return.  I compost my veggie peelings.

I have to laugh about electric cars, I do hope their owners realize that they are actually driving "coal-fired" cars - that's how we get our electricity!

One thing I'm pretty insane about (according to my brother) is "repurposing" things.  I hate to throw something away that can be used for something.  We were constantly arguing when going through our parents "stuff" - he wanted to just throw everything away and I wanted to see if someone could use it.  We had perfectly good mattresses that were practically new and had only been put in guest rooms - one only used a couple of times overnight and with protective mattress pads.  He was hauling them out to the street for the garbage and it really bothered me.  I questioned some neighbors and two were thrilled to take them off our hands.

My real pet peeve is all the danged packaging they put stuff in the stores!  There's only two of us and we fill a garbage bag practically everyday with packaging. 

[jmyrlefuller]

What we have here is "no-sorting" recycling: you basically put everything recyclable into its own bin and let the sanitation workers sort it out. The whole sorting thing is now pretty much a thing of the past.

We also have the bottle deposit law in some states, which provides ¢ertain £inan¢ial in¢entive$ to recycle. (Especially the food stamp recipients, whom I've written about before.)

[EC]

Our recycling is semi voluntary. We have a bin for general waste, which goes to the incinerator. A bin for recycling (glass, metal, plastic and paper) which goes to the recycling sorting plant, which is run by power generated from the incinerator. A third bin for garden waste which is composted and used by the council for all the plantings (plus each resident with a green bin can pick up two bags of compost a year for free for their own garden) which, in a Royal Borough, are extensive! Any profits from the recycling go to keep the Council Tax low.

It works pretty well, I'd say there is a 98% recycling rate in the borough. Because it is zero effort to do. No real sorting needed, since all the recyclables are sorted at the plant. Can't be bothered rinsing out a tin or a bottle? Drop it in the incinerator rubbish and no one cares.

Repurposing though - yep, same here!  Repairing too.

[EC]

This is a genuine coincidence - this article just popped up on my feed from a completely unrelated source.

Plastic Bags Are Good for You

Here is a list of things that are thicker than a typical plastic grocery bag: A strand of hair. A coat of paint. A human cornea.
High-density polyethylene is a miracle of materials science. Despite weighing less than 5 grams, one bag can hold 17 pounds, well over 1,000 times its own weight. At about a penny apiece, the bags are cheap enough for stores to give away and sturdy enough to carry home two gallons of milk in the evening and still be up to the task of scooping Cujo's poop the next morning.

Yet almost as soon as grocers started offering their customers the choice of "paper or plastic?" these modern marvels became a whipping boy for environmentalists, politicians, and other well-intentioned, ill-informed busybodies. Plastic bags for retail purchases are banned or taxed in more than 200 municipalities and a dozen countries, from San Francisco to South Africa, Bellingham to Bangladesh. Each region serves up its own custom blend of alarmist rhetoric; coastal areas blame the wispy totes for everything from asphyxiated sea turtles to melting glaciers, while inland banners decry the bags' role in urban landscape pollution and thoughtless consumerism.

But a closer look at the facts and figures reveals shaky science and the uncritical repetition of improbable statistics tossed about to shore up the case for a mostly aesthetic, symbolic act of conservation.

How did one of the most efficient, resource-saving inventions of the 20th century become an environmentalist bugaboo?

Research

Before 1800, if you bought or traded for an object, you were pretty much on your own to get it home. People carried baskets for the little stuff and wheeled carts for the bigger items, often toting scraps of canvas or other durable fabric to wrap messier or more fragile goods, such as meat or pastries. This was back when the germ theory of disease was yet to be broadly accepted, and there were not yet Laundromats on every street corner.

In the early 19th century, paper became cheap enough that merchants started using it to package their wares, tying off the bundles with string—a huge leap for both convenience and sanitation. The paper bag was invented in the 1850s, but it wasn't until the 1870s that a factory girl named Margaret Knight cobbled together a machine that cut, folded, and glued flat-bottomed paper receptacles. While the brown paper bag seems like the height of humdrum to modern eyes, Knight's machine was kind of a big deal: She won a bitter intellectual property fight to receive one of the first patents ever awarded to a woman, and was eventually decorated by Queen Victoria for her efforts. Over time, the paper bag got cheaper and stronger and sprouted handles, but it remained essentially unchanged, comfortably dominating the stuff-schlepping market for the next 100 years.

Read more: https://reason.com/archives/2015/09/01/plastic-bags-are-good-for-you

It's long (3 pages) but absolutely fascinating.

[DCPatriot]

My county here in the Peoples Republic of Maryland forces retailers to charge a five cents for each bag you want/need.

That said, I'm careful to cut both handles with a scissors or knife so that little critters don't get themselves tangled up and trapped in them.

Especially do that with the heavier grade of plastic that hold soft drinks or Gatorade.  Saw a pic of a turtle with a horrifically deformed shell that was apparently stuck in one when it was much smaller.

I used to recycle.   Don't anymore. 

Have run completely out of f**ks to give. 

[truth_seeker]

Our city council imposed a plastic bag ban, and voted to impose a ten cent charge for bags, too.

Last November two council members who supported the ban and fees, were booted from office, and replaced by others that promised a vote. They also cancelled the bag ban/ fees.

We are a beach town with a lot of environmental awareness and concern, yet our residents want a say in things.

One of the two booted, has left town, looking for another political gig.

[Oceander]

I have a two-server garbage system.  If I feel like tossing it in the blue bin, then the recycling people take it.  If I throw it into the green or brown bins, then the regular trash people take it.  I (generally) don't throw the food scraps in the blue bin, but that's about it.